African-American Dance - History

History

The Greater Chesapeake area embracing Virginia, Maryland, and much of North Carolina was the earliest and perhaps most influential location of the black-while cultural interchange that produced "African American" dance. Captive Africans from numerous societies in several African regions began pouring into the area as slaves from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Given their cultural heterogeneity, including music and dance, they mostly likely learned to dance together by drawing on the "grammar of culture" shared across much of Western and Central Africa. Something like a regional Chesapeake tradition, a thing entirely novel in European eyes, arose perhaps not long before the eighteenth century had become the nineteenth. Within one or two generations of establishing these creolized African forms, or perhaps simultaneously, elements of European dances were added. "Competitive individuality and improvisation" were also Choreographic Elements of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century West African Dance" that were continued in this region.

Based on the limited pictorial record, the typical African practice of bending emphatically at the waist and hips gave way to a more upright, European like style. This may have reflected the African practice of carrying heavy loads on the head, which requires a strong, balancing spine. Black dancing continued strong preferences of other African characteristics such as angularity and asymmetry of body positions, multiple body rhythms or polyrhythms, and a low center of gravity.

Jig, Clog, and Break Down Dancing have been attributed to African Americans, although this is disputed. A visitor to the southern United States wrote that "Hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels Put life and mettle into their heels...No restraint of the etiquettish ball-room...What luxury of motion... This is dancing. It knocks the spangles out of the ball-room."